


The Fog Of War

by FictionPenned



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alex asked why we even have this lever, Angst, Cartmel Masterplan, Lungbarrow, Other, The Cartmel Masterplan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-09
Updated: 2020-01-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:13:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22187626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FictionPenned/pseuds/FictionPenned
Summary: A disapprovingtskslithers its way through the fog as The Master’s tongue clicks against the back of his teeth. “Come now, love. Hardly the first time.” It is an unwelcome reminder, and he knows it. He revels in ignoring boundaries, in pushing people just that little bit too far. The Doctor has always been a particularly fun target, lashing back out of him with unexpected ruthlessness and cruelty, and yet, here she sits -- broken, motionless, silent. How unlike her. The change is deeply unsettling; it prickles beneath the surface of his skin and ever so slightly rewrites the rules of this little game that they’ve been playing for centuries.
Relationships: The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan), Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who)
Comments: 38
Kudos: 266





	1. Denial

Mist suffocates the cliffs of Oregon. It makes every breath a bit heavier, a bit harder to take. It sticks to her tongue and clings to the back of her throat like the dozens of promises that had been easy to make and even easier to break. It tastes of salt and the sea and the thousands of tears that the Doctor has been swallowing back since the TARDIS’ doors had swung shut behind three people who had not so much as bothered to glance back over their shoulders at her as they went. It threatens to steal her away and bury her and her broken hearts somewhere in the middle of the ocean.    
  
Drowning would be a fitting punishment for her crimes. She lied to them, she betrayed them, and they watched her surrender to those cruel instincts that never seem to go away, no matter how quickly she tries to run. She deserves worse than life, worse than death, worse than a hundred fates as yet unconceived, and yet in her cowardice, all she can manage is to stride to the edge of the cliff and hurl her sonic screwdriver into the waves that crash against a beach that lies somewhere far below she stands, completely unseen. The forging of a new sonic is always a promise, a refusal to take up arms, and she had broken that promise. It feels right that she should rid herself of it, and yet, its absence does not lessen the weight of her guilt. 

Instead, she crumples beneath it, and -- drawing her knees to her chest and staring out into the stark gray of the nothingness that lies before her -- she allows quaking sobs to once again consume her. Every passing second feels like an eternity, and she cries until she has nothing left to give, until she is nothing but a hollow shell of grief and guilt and loss. 

The Doctor doesn't know how much time has passed before light seeps through her swollen lids. Four flashes from a distant lighthouse and then a quiet wash of darkness. She ignores it, brushes it aside as nothing. Whatever it might be, it doesn’t matter, just as she doesn’t matter.   
  
Despite her disregard, it persists. Four flashes and then nothing. Four flashes and then nothing. Four flashes and then ...  _ Contact _ .

Familiarity stirs in the bottomless chasm of her chest as a mind brushes against hers, but she shoves it away and shuts it out, the faintest echo of rage boiling somewhere deep within her blood. The Master is unwelcome in her life even at the best of moments, and he most certainly is not allowed to wallow in the lowest points of her trajectory. Koschei would have been allowed to linger, but the boy that Koschei had been devolved into chaos long ago, pushed by ambition and a council of people determined to bend him to their own wills until he broke beneath the pressure.    
  
The flashing stops. His mind retreats, and she is once again left alone. She should run back to her TARDIS, close the doors and race off to somewhere where he might not be able to track her down, but she can’t seem to find the will to stand, nonetheless flee. Perhaps she deserves this. Perhaps she deserves a fresh bout of his hellfire. Perhaps she finally deserves to give him what he wants: her death at his hands.    
  
It is impossible to know how much time passes. There are no ticking clocks, only her drying tears and the insatiable press of the mist and the quiet acceptance of any number of the dreadful, horrible fates that might befall her at his hands.

After a time, she feels the tiny hairs along her arms and on the back of her neck stand on end. The reflex carries with it a vague sense of both seeing and being seen, an echo of the collective memories that are injected into every cell of a Time Lord’s body. Carefully bred, meticulously engineered, painstakingly grown. Given the strict circumstances under which they were first created and then raised, it is a miracle that they both managed to go so wrong.    


"Heard you went nuclear." Sadistic glee permeates his voice, creeping into the edges of his words and tugging them upwards. “Took out an entire planet, did we?” 

The Doctor doesn’t so much as turn, doesn’t so much as lift her head, doesn’t so much as  _ blink _ . There’s not much point in staring down her own humiliation. It will happen whether she likes it or not, and so far as she’s concerned, it is well-deserved. It would be more palatable if it took place at the hands of someone better, someone who was not intent upon sowing discord across the universe, but this is hardly the time for nuance. She committed an atrocity, and she sincerely believed, up until the very moment that she came face-to-face with the reality of that which she wrought, that she did so in the name of  _ goodness _ . To her, that’s even worse. It has shifted her entire perception of morality -- her entire perception of her own  _ self _ \-- shattering thousands of years of memories into taunting fragments that all turn up flawed. 

A disapproving  _ tsk _ slithers its way through the fog as The Master’s tongue clicks against the back of his teeth. “Come now, love. Hardly the first time.” It is an unwelcome reminder, and he knows it. He revels in ignoring boundaries, in pushing people just that little bit too far. The Doctor has always been a particularly fun target, lashing back out of him with unexpected ruthlessness and cruelty, and yet, here she sits -- broken, motionless, silent. How  unlike her. The change is deeply unsettling; it prickles beneath the surface of his skin and ever so slightly rewrites the rules of this little game that they’ve been playing for centuries. 

He crouches in front of her, and a faint shiver wracks her body as he slides a single knuckle beneath her chin, guiding it up so that he might look at her properly.    
  
The Doctor summons up enough will to offer up a perilously quiet “ _ Don’t _ ,” but other than that, she doesn’t fight him. His very touch sets her skin crawling, yet she doesn’t even bother to shrug him away. There is some scant comfort to be found in feeling anything other than worthless, even if that something is as undesirable as repulsion.    
  
Head tilting, the Master’s dark eyes regard her, flickering from puffy eyes to parted lips to the damp bangs plastered against her forehead. He hasn’t seen her look this worse for wear in a long time, and at the hands of a disaster that he did not engineer. How unfair it is that she survived his traps for so long, only to fall victim to a fate of her own making. “Can’t remember the last time you said this little. When we were children by a river, maybe. With someone else’s blood on your hands.”

_ There it is _ .

Burning, roiling, restless fury sweeps across her green eyes, chasing away the dead glaze that took up such stubborn residence within them. “I did that for you, as you well know.” Disgust curls her lips, and she raises a hand to brush away that condescending hand on her chin, but the Master catches her wrist in his other hand. His grip is firm, but far from the vice that she has come to expect of him. 

A pause falls between them as stare meets stare, rage meets rage, and memory meets memory.    


The Master’s tongue works against the point of a single tooth as his mind weighs actions and consequences, pitting love against murder, but the the Doctor speaks first. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”  _ Then or now _ .    
  
Amusement curls in between his words as the Master wryly replies, “You never do, do you?” And yet she gallavants across the universe, leaving a river of bodies in her wake. Some probably deserved it, but others … who knows how many people become collateral damage in her self-imposed struggle to save the universe, forcibly instilling order even in cases where it halts progress. The Doctor has never been one to carefully consider the consequences of her actions, or the depths of her own misdeeds. She considers herself to be above such things, even while she holds the people around her to ridiculous moral standards. It is one of the many things about her that he finds endlessly infuriating.    
  
“ _ Stop _ .” The word hisses like ice meeting a hot stove, fizzing, popping, dissolving into the charged air between them. She twists her arm, and the Master allows her to break away from him, watching intently as she struggles to her feet, staggering ever so slightly as exhaustion battles against her sense of balance. “I would never, ever, even  _ once _ consider doing the things that you have done.”

The mist around them almost seems to absorb the laughter that ushers forth from the Master's chest, muffling, stifling, suffocating. "You don't think. You never did. You just act. You destroyed our home before I did. You shut away a war and forced them to turn on  _ me _ . Did you think then?" He feigns consideration of the question, eyes appealing to the dull air above them before he settles on an airy, "I don't think you did."

She gathers her coat tightly around her as she edges backwards, moving towards the TARDIS that ought to still be around here somewhere. "You were long gone already." 

"You can't run around the universe saving every precious human you stumble across and then leave your people to die, Doctor. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works." He’s still crouched where she had left him, gesturing at the empty air even as the moisture blurs the air between them. The mist is too thick. Unnaturally thick. It is almost as though sorrow and fear have taken over the world itself.    
  
“What do you want me to do?” The question is an explosion, edged on either side by the frantic beating of her hearts. “I can’t undo it. Something that big, it’s a fixed point. I’ve already  _ tried _ .” She continues to creep backward until first her palm and then her back press against the familiar wooden walls of her TARDIS. Despite the clammy chill of the air, it’s warm, alive, buzzing beneath her touch. With a quick snap of her fingers, she could be gone from him, gone from this. She could spend every moment of the rest of her life  _ running _ , but she’s already tried that. It never really works. Her past and her darkness always manage to catch up with her before too long.

The Master’s movements are almost languid as he rises, half-seen through the fog. As he moves to adjust his cufflinks, he almost seems at home here, like some ghost that’s been left behind, trapped in a single moment of endlessly repeating time. However, he’s not here to haunt the cliffs. He’s here to haunt  _ her _ . He’s the ghost of the home and the past and the faces that she’s left behind. He is who she’s been, who she is, and who she could be if she stopped desperately clinging to the moniker of  hero . 

He closes the space between them in a third of the time that it took her to create it, bracing his hands on either side of her head. The ship responds to his touch -- sparks of unseen electricity arcing between his fingertips -- but it does not push him away. They know each other well, the Master and this TARDIS, just as intimately as they both know the Time Lord that’s pressed between them.    
  
The pair is close. Too close. Their breaths mix and mingle in the scant space between them, shared warmth washing over the charged skin of their bodies. The Master’s eyes shift and flicker, unable to find a single place to settle, whereas the Doctor’s gaze remains fixed, attempting to project a calm that she does not feel.    
  
“What’re you going to do? Kill me?” The question is almost taunting as it spins from the Doctor’s lips, half-wishing that her best enemy would finally gather the nerve to finally carry out the deed. It’s selfish of her -- cowardly, even -- but she’d do almost anything to rid herself of the guilt and grief that’s devouring her from the inside out. “You already destroyed our home. Might as well finish the job.”   
  
For a moment, the Master considers it -- fingers twitching almost involuntarily as he thinks of the weight of the knife in his pocket -- but he stands firm. She has spent centuries fighting to bring out the best in him, why shouldn’t he be allowed a little  _ dalliance _ in order to bring out the worst in her?    
  
A feral smile slips across his face as he finally indulges her with an answer. “Unlock those doors, and maybe you’ll find out.” Eyebrows raise as he drags his eyes away from her just long enough to indicate the blue wall behind her, before she once again has his full attention. “Come on, Doctor, I know that little thing you do.” He leans back ever so slightly, his fingers hovering a hair's breadth away from her ear, and snaps.   
  
The Doctor blinks at the suddenness of the noise, but she does not flinch. Her hands remain unmoved, pressed into the wood of the box as tightly as possible. The beating of her hearts grows louder, drowning out the distant rhythm of waves against the shore and the hiss of each and every one of the Master’s breaths as they slip across her own lips. The Master leans in tighter, leg pressing against leg and chest pressing against chest, and she can feel the unforgiving press of a blade through their coats. He brought a weapon to this fight. She can’t say that she’s surprised. She is, however, shocked that he hasn’t yet drawn it.    
  
Tension reigns between them for a long, pointed, calculated moment before he presses his lips to hers. It is far from the first time that they’ve done this, but it is the first time in these bodies. There’s something about it that threatens to sweep the Master away -- the power, the warmth, the sense of being  _ found _ \-- but he does not allow him to lose sight of his goal. One hand finds the side of her face as the other slips into the pocket of her coat, wrapping around the cool metal of her key.    
  
For the briefest of moments, the Doctor almost finds the kiss to be a distraction -- a welcome comfort in an endless sea of misery -- but that warmth disappears all too quickly. They are not the people that they once were. Not friends, not allies, probably not even the last two Time Lords left standing. She’s lost that, just as she’s lost her home and her fam and her hope. She flounders at the thought, struggling for freedom and breath and sanity against the endless press of  _ him _ , and almost without casting foresight towards the consequences, her hands wrap around the hilt of his knife and turn it inward, diving the blade too hard and too fast into his side.    
  
The Master staggers backward, eyes widening in surprise. His hand presses against his side, fingers and stolen key coming away coated in his blood. His eyes gaze up at her, full of desperate, pleading panic, and she can’t bring herself to meet them. 

“I’m so sorry, I --”   
  
The Doctor doesn’t finish the thought before adrenaline offers up the will she had been lacking, pushing around the corner, bringing her fingers up in a decisive snap, and slamming the TARDIS doors behind her.    
  
Surely she can keep running as long as she has to.    
  
She can still fight to do better, fight to balance the scales as best as she can and leave this all behind her.   
  
She can find a new group of friends to carry around the universe.    
  
She can --    
  
She reaches into a pocket that feels strangely empty, and just as the sinking sense of realization hits her, the doors swing open, letting in the mist and the sorrow and the ghost that she intended to leave behind.


	2. Grief

Blood drips onto the honeycombed floor with every staggering step forward. It pools in ominous shadows, bringing interminable darkness into a place that had been designed for light and warmth and biscuits passed between friends on shared journeys. A wince tugs at the corners of the Doctor’s lips at the idea of her space being permanently tainted by his presence, of all the stains -- seen and unseen -- that she might never be able to wash away.    
  
As if in response to the thought, one by one, the lights along the walls and the floor fade into blackness until all that remains is the dim light of the engines. It glows red in her eyes and orange in his, and cuts even the softest curves on their faces into sharp, unforgiving angles. 

The initial shock upon the Master’s face has settled into an unsettling expression of pure, manic glee. “You stabbed me. You actually did it. You stabbed me.” Words devolve into laughter as he pulls his bloodied hand away from his side long enough to offer up a single echoing clap in tribute. The part of him that revels in her misery is almost tempted to beg for an encore performance, to see just how far she’s willing to go in order to chase him out of her life. It would be worth it to offer up his life in exchange for witnessing the very moment when she becomes that catastrophic force that he has so long believed her to be.

The Doctor’s lips tighten, hand coming up to point accusatorially in his direction, like a teacher who has caught a student stepping out of line. “ _I_ _know_.”   
  
A hiss of barely contained pain whispers past the Master’s lip as he braces himself against a pillar, still clutching his side. It is far from the worst pain that she has inflicted upon him, but it’s unusual for her to bloody her own hands in the process. Usually, she manipulates others into doing the dirty work for her while she clings to whatever false ideal of a moral high ground she is currently cultivating. He has seen her be vengeful, he has seen her be ruthless, but he has rarely seen her be truly _bloodthirsty_. It’s a good look on her -- the shadows, the darkness, the chilling red of her stare. Destroyer of Worlds indeed.  
  
“Since you’re the ‘Doctor’ and all,” he drawls, gesturing towards her with his hand, slick blood glinting in the low light, “You wouldn’t happen to keep a kit around, would you, love? Wouldn’t want to ruin the carpet.” Despite the confidence in his words, his voice wavers ever so slightly. Ever since the very moment when his worldview was shattered by inconvenient truths, he has barely been able to hold himself together, relying on nothing more than old habits and the inherent power of the name that he had chosen.   
  
The Doctor shoots him a glare that could cut stone as she circles around the control room. In a way, she is grateful that he had inserted himself back into her life at this particular moment. It is easier to be ruled by anger than ravaged by grief.

In response to his request, she disdainfully nudges a hidden compartment open with her boot, sending a haphazard and incoherent assortment of items spilling onto the floor. She crouches in order to better see them in the dark, and after a moment, she rises with a small cardboard box clutched in her hand. Mustering all her strength, she hurls it in the Master’s direction, and it hits him squarely in the face with a satisfying  _ smack _ . 

“They’ve got Wile E. Coyote on them! Seems like your style.” On the surface, her voice almost manages to soar back to its usual carefree humor, but something beneath it remains hollow and joyless.

The Master winces as he retrieves the box from the place on the floor, and it takes him a painfully long time to straighten. The wound is deeper than he had initially thought, and probably a great deal deeper than she had intended, if indeed, she had thought at all before plunging a knife into his side. He can barely make out the print on the front, already tainted by bloody fingerprints. ‘BAND-AID’ the box loudly declares above a rendering of a cartoon rabbit. The inside of the box is no better, only halfway full with tiny, paper-wrapped pieces of bandage. He would heal himself, but he doesn’t have the residual energy to give without committing to a full regeneration.

He looks up, eyebrows raised. “You can’t be serious.”

“ _ Oh _ , I very much am.” She shoves the rest of the detritus back into the hole from which it had come, closing the door with a decisive click before leaning back against a railing on the opposite side of the room from where he stands, arms crossed over her chest. 

“Is this what you do when one of your pets gets hurt?”   
  
“First of all, they’re people. Second of all, they don’t get hurt.” The Doctor shifts her weight from foot to foot, restless. She’s done with him, done with the conversation, done with her past sneaking its way back into her life over and over again.   
  
The Master’s eyes narrow, head tilting in interest. “Come now, Doctor. We both know that’s not true.”

“You wouldn’t know, would you? You’ve never been  _ invited _ .”   
  
With a great degree of effort, he pushes himself away from the pillar, crossing the space between them in slow, unsteady steps. He half expects her to retreat, but she stands her ground, stalwartly lifting her chin as he draws increasingly nearer. His eyes drop, and he can see the rise and fall of her throat as she swallows. He could reach out and touch her, could kiss that throat before ripping at it with his teeth, but he has already been gifted with a knife in the side for pushing her boundaries, and he is not foolish enough to gamble on a losing hand.    


“As I recall, you spent  _ ages _ going on about how you wanted us to see the universe together. Just you and me. Was that not an invitation?” His breaths come short and ragged, interrupting him every few words.   
  
“You were never interested in seeing the universe, only in owning it.”   
  
His mouth hitches upward into a sly smile. “Unfair. I do have --” There’s a weighted pause as he considers his words, “--  _ Other _ interests.” His eyes flick down to her lips for the briefest of moments before he braces himself against the same railing, pressing his opposite hand into his still bleeding side. He’ll have to do something about it soon, or he’ll faint in her arms. There once were times when he could trust her to catch him, but as she’s grown far less charitable of late.    
  
An exasperated huff puffs his cheeks as he turns his eyes skyward. “Besides, you’re just as interested in saving it. Almost the same thing when it comes down to it.”   
  
She pivots, taking a step closer, turning up her nose and staring intently into his eyes. It is perilous degree of proximity for them both. “I help people. You hurt them. That’s different.”   
  
“Planet. Dead. Your hands. Did you already forget?”   


Her wrath simmers, almost tangible in the hairsbreadth of space left between their faces. Her mouth is so close to his that she almost speaks her words directly onto his lips. “If you regenerate, don’t do it in my TARDIS. Just redecorated.”   
  
“Yeah, have I mentioned that I _hate_ it?”   
  
“I don’t care.” The Doctor takes a step back and turns away, stalking back towards the console. Her hands slide across the controls almost aimlessly as she considers where best to drop him. She could make it easy on them both by just dropping him at a hospital in the middle of deep space, somewhere where he could do the least amount of damage. However, she’d be left alone to process the enormity of her grief, and he’d find his way out soon enough and wander back to Earth in one desperate bid for attention or another, leaving death and chaos in his wake.    
  
Engines thrum under the pads of her fingers with the consistency of a heartbeat. She could always let the TARDIS choose where to go, but that would mean relinquishing control, and she is a little short on trust right now. 

“If you abandon me in Siberia or something, I’ll kill your friends.” 

The threat floats across the control room with casual ease. The Doctor ignores it. She doesn’t have friends anymore. They always move on and leave her behind in the end, and she’s left to start over. The Master is the only person who seems to stick around, and she doesn’t even like him. It’s hardly fair, but then again, the universe is never fair. If it was, it wouldn’t let her doom entire planets when she’s only trying to  _ help _ .    
  
In her mind, she runs through entire lexicons of planets, spanning across countless galaxies. None of them seem safe. None of them seem final. None of them will rid her of him. It is, perhaps, and unwelcome realization that the safest place for the Master to be is right here, where she can keep a watchful eye on him, but even here, there is far too much at stake. The entirety of time and space at his fingertips, unlimited access to  _ her _ TARDIS and the consciousness within, how endless their games of cat and mouse would become if they are forced to share a single pocket of time and space.   
  
“Where would you drop me?” she asks, partially out of genuine curiosity and mostly because if he chooses to be dishonest, it will allow her to cross something off the list.    
  
An indecisive shrug lifts the Master’s shoulders. “Home, probably. You always hated it there.”   
  
“You destroyed our home.”   
  
“Not my problem, really. You’re the one in hostage negotiations with yourself.” Vision swimming, the Master looks down at his side before resigning himself to the floor. “Have you ever considered that maybe grabbing a knife is not an appropriate response to being snogged by an old friend?   


The Doctor’s hands retreat from the controls as she rubs the tiredness from her eyes and pushes her stubbornly damp hair away from her forehead. Though the fog remains outside these walls, its discomfort still linger. “You were barely a friend.”   
  
Eyes once again turns skyward as the Master screws up his face at the thought. “Best friends, then. You thought we were exactly the same, except I was better at school than you were.” Unmistakable resentment creeps into his voice. How wrong the Doctor was even then, before their paths had the faintest chance of diverging on their own accord. The future is prefabricated, predetermined, and he was never given the opportunity to receive the gifts that she has. He’s so much worthier than she ever was. Tears gather at the corners of his eyes, refracting the scant light, but he swallows them back and covers his pain with a well-placed jab at her expense. “Plus, you killed one of ours.”   
  
A sigh bubbles past the Doctor’s lips as her hands fall back to her sides. “I think the scores have swung a different way since then, don’t you?”   
  
“Yes, yours has gotten exponentially worse.”

“I don’t kill people for sport.”   
  
“I’m dying on your floor, right now.”   
  
“Suck it up, you’ll be  _ fine _ .” The Doctor leans into the final word even as doubt flickers in her eyes. 

She was not able to do the right thing when faced with choosing between sacrificing an entire planet and a single life, nor was she allowed to return to that very moment when regret had clawed at her heart and threatened to devour her alive, but she can help  _ him _ . Right here, right now. Arguably one of the worst people in the universe, and she has the power to stop his suffering.    
  
In most societies, doctors take an oath to always help and never harm. She has spent her life breaking that oath, over and over again, but she always comes back to it, always resolves to do better next time. As much as she hates it, this is her next time.    
  
Steeling her shoulders, the Doctor closes the space between them and sits, crossing her legs beneath her and sidling closer to him. She avoids eye contact as she rests her hand against the wound in his side, taking a few quiet breaths as she tries to summon just enough energy for a transfer. It’s been a long time since she last did this. Her face was different back then, and she cradled her wife’s hand close to her chest and offered comfort and a lie and a foolishly selfless amount of help. River slapped her for that, and she would probably do worse was she present to bear witness to this.    
  
The Master watches with wide, concerned eyes as golden energy arcs from the Doctor’s skin to his, seeking out damaged tissue and repairing it beneath her fingers. Somewhere deep within his abdomen, he can feel an organ knitting back together, muscles stretching across newly forged chasms, veins meeting and staunching the bleeding -- and it all burns with the intense heat of a raging inferno. All the while, he watches her face. In the bright wash of light in the darkness, he sees staunch certainty wash away doubt and fear in a way that has always lain beyond his reach. It stirs warring emotions in his hearts -- jealousy, hatred, fear -- each one fighting for dominance and spurring him to impulsive action. 

As the brightness of the energy fades, the lights of the TARDIS slowly stir to life again, pulsing a faint blue that slowly grows more and more confident. She still doesn’t know what to do with him, but the deed has taken some of the edge of her grief and the self-loathing that weaves in alongside.    
  
The faintest hint of a smile crinkles the corners of the Doctor’s eyes before it is whisked away by a particularly ear-grating observation by the fallen enemy beside her. 

"You never use my name, you know."

In an instant, she's back on her feet and keying in coordinates that she memorized a long, long time ago. A quick pull of a lever and the familiar groaning rush of dematerialization, and they're on their way. 

"Where are we going?"

"Exactly where you suggested. Home."


	3. Bargaining

Time loops and flows and moves in strange ways in Gallifrey, and that means that once a fire starts, it never stops burning. The world has been reduced to smoke and ash and rubble. A dusky orange sky that used to promise bright futures and now speaks only of sunrises left unseen.

The Doctor thought that she would be prepared to view the destruction this time -- that it would hurt her less now that she has bypassed the initial shock of it all -- but she forgot that shock often acts as a numbing agent. Everything hits harder and sharper, and she stumbles before she has fully exited the TARDIS doors. Staring out across the fallen, burning, broken world, she can almost hear the screams of those who suffered and died here -- sounds of people fighting and begging and pleading against a fate far crueler than they could have ever imagined. It sends a shiver down her spine and shakes her to her very core. 

The Doctor's pain is so utterly all-consuming that until he clears his throat, she has almost forgotten that the very monster who had committed this atrocity stands at her back.    
  
“Did the planet you killed look like this when you were done? Or is it hard to keep track of the destruction that you leave behind?”   
  
The Doctor moves so quickly that she might as well have dissolved into smoke. In these bodies, the pair is almost matched in height, so with the element of surprise on her side, it’s not difficult to pin the Master to the side of the TARDIS. She presses her forearm against his throat, digging in until the cadence of his breaths is little more than staccato wheezing. 

Her teeth glint in the orange light, flashing almost feral as she leans in closer, her words little more than a growl in his ear. “Don’t you dare compare your deeds to mine.  _ Ever _ .”   


A laugh barely escapes past the crushing pressure of her touch against his windpipe, so strangled and earnest that it could almost pass for a violent fit of coughing. It’s an incredibly uncomfortable sound; it weasels its way beneath the Doctor’s skin, grinding against already sensitive nerves. She shifts her feet ever so slightly, moving to accommodate her doubts, but she does not grant him respite. Though she does not relish in his suffering, she finds a vague sense of justice in watching him struggle. He has pushed her closer and closer to the breaking point over the centuries, and she wonders if he knows how perilously close she is to shattering into so many pieces that she’ll never have a chance of putting them all back together again.    
  
She hasn’t felt this broken since the Time War -- since the very moment she stumbled upon a chance to stop the endless string of atrocities and jumped to seize it. She paid the price for that, shouldering the burden of a war crime for centuries until enough time passed that she might be allowed to know the truth. Even with the truth in her hands, it took time to heal. Guilt's a stubborn thing. It clings to intentions and clouds the mind even in cases when the worst possible outcomes never came to pass. It took several miraculous human beings to guide her back towards the light, and it seems unlikely that such good fortune will bless her again this time. She’s too old, too tainted, too far gone to be rescued. Besides, everyone she has ever loved has either died or left or forgotten her. There is no one left aside from her TARDIS and the Master, and spaceships and murderers are no one’s first choice for comfort. 

She leans in a little bit harder, and his breaths squeak a little bit more. 

A snide smile stretches across the Master's face as flames of pure, hungry joy flicker behind his eyes. He doesn’t even try to push her away from him, simply accepts the violent press of her body against his. An eyebrow quirks upward as he continues to taunt her, voice hoarse. “Come on, Doctor. I know you lust for power. No point pretending otherwise. After all, it’s woven into your DNA. Looms and lust and  _ lies _ .”

“Stop it.” 

The Doctor’s voice falters slightly as she shifts her feet again. The Master’s eyes drop, tracking the movement, picking out weakness and opportunity. However, he doesn’t strike. Not yet. 

“I wonder…” The Master starts to say as his gaze fixes upon her face once again. 

No matter how many times she changes faces, the energy in those eyes is always the same, especially when he finds them focused on him. They’re full to the brim with disdain and regret and just enough lingering fondness to fray and soften the edges of their  _ bite _ . He thrives on all three of those responses. It’s so hard to build fulfilling relationships in a universe that’s falling apart at the seams; how delightful to know that though she may undo his plans and run him through with his own weapons, she’ll never truly turn him away.    
  
It takes him a moment to catch his initial train of thought and jump back on board. “I wonder if you would even bother to pick apart my little mystery on your own. So stubborn, so willing to believe the best in others, so eager to wear their skin and pretend to be one of them. Are you even capable of hunting down information that would destroy you? Do you really want to know why I razed our planet?"   
  
“ _ Don’t _ .” 

Lightning flashes in her eyes as once again, and her confidence and posture waver. 

This time, the Master is ready for it. 

A roar of effort rips from his lungs as he reverses their positions. A pointed jab of his foot into the back of her knees unseats her balance as he tears her away from his throat. There’s a scrambling of hands as he reclaims power, and it is only a moment before he has her pinned. The entire weight of his body presses into hers as his hands press her wrists against the wood on either side of her head. He can sense every muscle in her body wind and tense as she squirms beneath him, feel the trickle of her breath on his face, hear the faint and frantic four-by-four beat of her hearts in her chest.    
  
She aimed to hurt him, but he seeks nothing more than to dominate her. He doesn’t seek to steal the breath from her lungs or sink bruises into her skin; he only holds her firm and tilts his head and begins to ask a carefully curated set of questions designed to yank freedom from her grasp. 

“The three founding fathers of Gallifrey. Who were they?”    
  
The Doctor’s eyes jump from point to point on his face. She is grateful that she cannot see the smoldering mess of the capital city behind him, grateful the only reminder of their undoing is the crackling tension of shared rage and the smoke that shimmers in the air between them. 

“Why?” The word is pointed and defensive. Her mind races back to a hundred moments of humiliation at the Academy, moments in which history and science and basic philosophy slipped her mind and she was left floundering for want of correct answers. The Master was present for each and every one of them, so is that the game he’s playing at? Dragging out childhood failures for no clear reason other than smug satisfaction? 

A sigh drips from his lips as he screws his eyes closed, pressing his forehead against hers with impatient insistence. “You’ll get there, love. Don’t jump ahead and spoil the ending. Name them.”   
  
“Omega, The Other, Rassilon.” In their education, they were trained to speak Rassilon’s name first, but the Doctor deliberately puts him last. Rassilon was corrupted, cruel, and manipulated his people into fighting a war that was impossible to win. He deserves neither praise nor aplomb, only scathing derision and an unmarked grave. 

“Good.” The Master keeps his head braced against hers and breathes in. She smells of salt and smoke and blood, of storms and the devastation that they leave behind. He could drown in that smell. “Now, how are Time Lords made?” 

“They’re born.” Even as she speaks the claim, she knows that it isn’t true. Humans are born of love and hope and promises, but Time Lords are manufactured. She can cling to her delusions and her scattered, half-true anecdotes all she wants, but that doesn’t make her one of them. 

“No _! _ ” The word snaps with barely contained anger. He catches himself in the act as she flinches, and makes a concerted effort to soften the blow of the outburst with a gentle swipe of his thumb against her skin as he slides his hands upward, off of her wrists, and twines their fingers together. The hold is just as tight, just as aggressive, but it’s a tiny bit kinder. He needs her to listen. 

“No,” he repeats quietly. “ _ No _ . The truth, Doctor.”

Green eyes fix on his mouth just to avoid the fervor that lurks in his eyes. She tracks his lips as they wrap around every syllable, notices the little quirk upward as he says her name, as if it’s something that he had practiced. When she replies, her voice is distant, as though entirely separate from the body that had produced the sound. “Scrambled DNA, artificially woven together.” 

She inhales, feeling the breath catch in the tightness of her throat before her mind races off on a needless tangent. She knows that the Master will drag her back to the subject at hand, but she can never seem to stop her mind from wandering. “Curses never seem to account for technology, do they? Or maybe the cursed are just very, very good at exploiting loopholes. Determination will do that, you know. Very good in a pinch, determination.”

The Master doesn’t bother to drag her back. He doesn’t acknowledge that she’s carried the conversation on without him. He simply ignores her, and for some reason, that further intensifies her sense of dread. 

“The Other. How did they die?”   
  
“I didn’t kill him, if that’s what you’re on about.” She was, however, responsible for the death of Omega. Well, the second death of Omega, technically, which hardly even counts in the grand scheme of things. So far as she saw it, he had already been living on stolen time. 

“Not what I asked.” Their foreheads finally part as the Master lifts his head, staring intently at her eyes despite her dogged avoidance of his. “How did the Other die?”   
  
“I don’t know,” she says, bristling under the intense scrutiny. It’s one of the facts that she can never seem to keep in her mind. One moment it’s there, and in the next, it’s gone. Elusive thing, the Other. Dark and mysterious. She doubts that she’d even be able to remember Otherstide if it didn’t happen to coincide with her nameday. “I’ve never been good at tests.”

She's not good at being this close to people either. Not good at taming the nerves that rise in her belly with every second that they remain in contact. 

“He committed suicide. Jumped into a loom and was completely unmade, genetic code mixing with what was already there. Scattered and torn apart. There was a small chance, an infinitesimal chance that it could recombine in the same order, but no one ever thought it would. Why would they? Even the most powerful of the founders can’t defeat pure chance, not when he’s unwound and strung out and no longer living.”

The Doctor starts to tremble. There’s no real reason that she should respond so strongly to something that she has probably heard before. Judging by the number of times that she was forced to re-sit her exit exams, the story of the Other and their untimely death has likely crossed her ears more than a dozen times, but after each and every recitation, it faded and was forgotten. 

A single tear runs down her cheek, glinting orange in the familiar light of the second sun. 

“It was so close to being me,” the Master’s voice creeps louder, lashing out against the indignities of an unfair universe. “So close to being anyone in that cohort. Imagine being the most powerful of the founding fathers, reborn.” He bites the inside of his cheek to force down a laugh. “And then, imagine finding out that the Other is the worst in the class, someone so disjointed that they barely make rank, someone who would rather run away from Gallifrey than stand by its side.”   
  
“Don't be ridiculous, I --”   
  
A rush of panic closes in around the Doctor, darkness and memories racing together. The thought of the moments before birth, of the unmaking and then the making, the rush of a first breath so cold that it threatened to end her life before it even began.    
  
“They told me you were one of us. They  _ lied _ .”   
  
There’s a pause, brown eyes glinting with jealous rage. “And I burned them for it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was originally going to be 3 chapters but things went not as planned so strap in for 5-6 chapters, y'all.


	4. Depression

Reality crashes down upon them. 

The Master cocks his head as he watches the horror of the revelation sweep over her, snagging on the jagged edges of her denial and pulling them tight until they finally give way in a torrent of tears and sobs and frantically repeated ‘No’s that become less and less convincing with every utterance. He should revel in her discomfort, rejoice at finally bringing her low and tearing her apart, but instead, he is left with nothing but a vague sense of disappointment. Disgust curls the edges of his lips as he finally lets her go, stalking away to a nearby ridge. He doesn’t want to see her, doesn’t want to hear her, doesn’t understand why the very thing that should bring him joy has left him utterly joyless. 

The Master fantasized about this moment, clung to it even as he destroyed Gallifrey and everything that it represented, imagining each and every possible scenario for the reveal, and yet the moment itself was almost nothing. The burden of this knowledge had broken him, but the idea of unleashing its power upon her kept him going, pinned together the broken pieces for long enough that he could plant the seeds of his great plan. Without it, he feels on the brink of collapse. Master in name only, powerless because even now, she refuses to acknowledge it.

He reaches out a hand before him, watching the smoke whisper across his skin as he clenches his fist tight. Muscles burn and shake, pain bites into his palms, and yet, nothing seems to matter. Bitter, he plunges his hands into his pockets, turns his face skyward and closes his eyes against the sun, shutting out the unquenchable fire and the thoughts that nip at the corners of his mind.

  
  
  


Breathing is harder than it has ever been. Harder than it was when mist and grief threatened to drown her. Harder than when smoke curled its long fingers into her lungs. Harder than the many moments when she died and was reborn in pain and fire and destruction. Every shallow breath scrapes against the inside of her chest, threatening to slowly hollow her out from the inside until there is nothing left, and her vision narrows to a tiny, wavering pinprick of awareness amidst a threatening bulwark of impenetrable darkness.    
  
The only realities she can grasp onto are confusion and fear and the pressure of his body holding her upright, but soon enough, the pressure of his presence gives way, and she falls to the ground, stirring up a cloud of dirt and dust and ash. 

_ The Other _ .

The distaste in Rassilon’s eyes whenever she dared to be in his presence. The ceaseless fury with which he met her resistance when he dared to reach out of time and try to bring back Gallifrey at the expense of the universe. The familiarity when she looked into the schism and it looked back at her, as if they were meeting for the hundredth time. The unusual length of time it takes her to find herself again after she regenerates, while everyone else slips into new bodies as if nothing ever changed. The ease with which she condemns entire civilizations, as if she has been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years.   
  
_ The Other. The Other.  _

From the outset, her life has been an ongoing war of morals against instinct, of self against society, of sacrifice against destruction.    


_ The Other. The Other. The Other. _

Her identity has always been a bit slippery, hard to define and harder to maintain. She is Time Lord and traveler, hero and villain, destroyer of some worlds and savior of others, thief and arbiter, innovator and failure, blissfully free from obligation and brutally chained to the brutal legacy of her people and her role within it. Even recently, she has been the faithful custodian of a persona that lured people in and kept them close up until the very moment when rage and fear and loss swept it all away. 

Contradictions inside of contradictions. 

The sense of moving backwards even when she resolved to hold her head high, be her best self, and trudge dutifully onward.

The Doctor curls in on herself, drawing her legs close to her chest and protecting her frantically beating hearts from the destruction that burns somewhere outside of the edges of her current awareness. She doesn’t bother wondering where the Master might have gone, doesn’t spare the energy to consider what goal he holds, doesn’t think of him at all. There is no room in her crisis for a second person. 

Her mind presses against her earliest memories, pushing and pushing against that first moment of awareness as if she might somehow break through to whatever lies before. She meets nothing but resistance and a dark and empty void. It would have been nice to find something --  _ anything _ \-- that offered clarity, but the universe has not been so kind. It strikes her that if any of this is true, she’s hardly more than a replica of a drained vessel -- prior consciousness had long ago fled to whatever lies beyond death -- but reason doesn’t stop her efforts.    
  
Her mind fights, reaching further back and further out, until she hits something.    
  
At first, she doesn’t recognize it. 

The chill of uncertainty sinks into her skin. It doesn’t belong to her, but she feels it as keenly as she has ever felt anything. Disappoint spreads across her tongue, sinking in with sharp, needling pain. The mind grapples with a single word, a single title, a single commitment to expectations that were never reached --  _ Master _ . 

The Doctor reached into the past but collided with the only other living telepath on the planet. 

Under different circumstances, she might have recoiled, but there’s something blissful to be found in suffering with someone else, of gritting her teeth and grappling with someone else’s pain instead of her own. There’s comfort in it, clarity, even. It stills her panic long enough for her lungs to draw enough breath to keep her lucid, stops her muscles shaking for long enough that she can finally sit up and lean back against the unerring support of her TARDIS. 

She is still not herself, their planet has still been ravaged, but she is no longer  _ alone _ . 

  
  
  


The Master feels her mind brush against his. Eyes rush open as he turns in alarm, wildly seeking out an oncoming threat, but he sees only his greatest friend and greatest enemy huddled against a barely functioning TARDIS, dust-covered and tear-stained and still splattered with his blood. He waits for words to come, for an attack to strike, for her to lash out and wish him dead, but nothing comes. There’s only emptiness and quiet grief and a plague of doubts lined with unanswered questions. For a moment, he considers pushing her out, cutting off the contact, but something stays his hand. 

Perhaps that hesitation is greed. The Other founded a civilization once, they could do it again and he could help her, stand by her side and bask in the glory of it all. Perhaps it is nostalgia. He has fond memories of days spent laughing and losing and fighting together, before either of them were been twisted into murderers, before he dared to discover who she was and all the things that he could never be. Perhaps it is something else. There is something to be said about the desperate need to understand and be understood, and there is only one creature left in the universe that has lived what he has lived and suffered what he has suffered. 

He doesn’t think as he closes the distance between them. Doesn’t think as he crouches in the dirt and the ashes beside her and takes her face in his hands. Doesn’t think as he settles a kiss upon her lips without violence or ulterior motive.    
  
And she returns it.    
  
Their separate sadness and anger and pain blend into a single shared sense of loss. Their mouths taste of the salt of the Oregon mist and the acrid smoke that hangs over Gallifrey. They are a long way from forgiveness, but the door has swung open just far enough to dream of the possibility.

For a moment, four broken hearts seem to beat in time, and they’re back to being young and foolish and spread out on a blanket on a hill, looking out across a city that might be theirs someday. That future was destroyed long ago, but there are still others to ponder. The Doctor and the Master and the entire universe spread out before them.    


Breaths are heavy and panting as they part. 

Her hand creeps to the back of his neck, keeping him close, clinging to proximity and certainty and whatever he has left to give. She knows that he could crush her in an instant, that he could humiliate her and leave her here, but she clings to hope and promise and the knowledge that he was once kind, once generous, once defended her against those who thought the worst of her. There's a chance they could have that again, that he might finally accept her offer to travel the stars and to see the universe without needing to own it. Perhaps they can fight against their worst instincts and strive to be better. Maybe someday they will stand here and look out upon their home -- gloriously rebuilt and better than it ever was before. 

Or maybe they'll sink their teeth into each other's throats at the first opportunity and be thrown back into the endless cycle of destruction. 

All the Doctor can do is hope for the best.

“Hello.”


	5. Acceptance

Rain fills the air around them. It falls in the wrong direction, creeping up towards some unseen pull, dancing across delicate skin and soothing wounds that have only just begun to heal. This planet hasn’t been given a name yet. Nothing in the universe has been given a name yet. This early in the history of the universe, everything in it is yet unnamed. There is no place with language, no place with sentient thought, nothing but physics and the chaotic birth of stars and moons and monuments.    
  
On Gallifrey, the Doctor extended her hand to the Master, stepped back on promises and apologies and the many, many times when she breached the boundaries of casual cruelty in favor of ruthless vengeance, and opened her doors and offered him a place in her TARDIS -- all on the condition that he learn to appreciate the universe as it is, rather than peer through to what it could be if he was permitted to mold it in his image. He merely stared at her, mouth perched in a tidy smirk, and rattled off all the ways in which she, too, manipulated the universe to align with her own personal values, rather than allowing it to progress of its own accord.    
  
She was almost tempted to stab him again for that biting critique, but she dropped the knife somewhere in that interminable fog on the Oregon coastline. All the better for it, if she’s honest. It is difficult to stake a valid claim to the high ground if you keep stepping off of it, and the Master has never been as easy to fool as the endless parade of companions that have passed through her doors. He knows her too intimately. He watched her grow, spent years anticipating moves and countermoves, imagined a thousand futures passed together. He felt the monumental, sprawling galaxy of her thoughts in the space between them, glimpsed some of her memories and saved them as his own. He sat in libraries with her while her mind wandered, vainly pulling her back to the task at hand for a handful of passing moments before she wandered off on yet another tangent. He was frustrated by and infatuated by her in equal measure. He glared upon her with admiration and hatred. He watched her kill in his name long before he contemplated taking a life himself. He discovered the secret of her creation before she even thought to consider that something was _wrong_.    
  
He loves her obsessively, and she knows that. She has always known that, and she ran from it the same way that she ran from everything else in her life. To the Doctor, the past is always better left unacknowledged and unspoken. She has too many mistakes to bury, too many ghosts to haunt her, too many heartbreaks to count. It is easier to be someone else, to reduce her history to a title and a planet and a tiny bit of thievery, but the easy path has never fixed anything. It doesn’t mend broken hearts or save wounded planets or atone for broken promises.    
  
_ Never be cowardly _ .   
  
She made that vow before she regenerated, but she never followed it through properly. Sure, she may have been brave in the face of danger, and carefully chose which battles she was willing to fight, but she shoved her nature and her history aside to do so. She allowed her darker instincts to simmer and fester until they exploded, dragging a planet to an early grave and chasing her friends away.    
  
_You can’t stop being cowardly if you are still afraid of who you are._   
  
But she righted the scales in her own little way. She may not know who she is or what being born of the Other may mean, but still, she extended her hand to an old friend and a best enemy. Her history inserted itself back into her life, and she invited it to stay. After great debate, her history had agreed.

The dawn of time was the compromise for coexistence. Nothing to doom. Nothing to conquer. Nothing to save. Just two trickster gods flitting from star to star on a grand tour.

There are good days and there are bad days. There are days when they spit venomous names at each other and then disappear to unseen corners to sulk and lick their wounds. There are days when they come to blows and the TARDIS threatens to kick them both out. There are days in which they break down and cry in each other’s arms. There are days when the universe seems beautiful and hope is light in their hearts and they think that they might be ready to step forward in time, but then the cycle repeats, and they are back to fighting and squabbling and gnashing their teeth.    
  
There are kisses and confrontations. There is grief and triumph. There is loathing and there is love, and surrounding it all, there is an entire universe spread out before them. Time travel is off-limits, but maybe there will yet come a day when they can key in those coordinates and walk among crowded streets, to be not heroes or villains, but observers and participants in the simplest acts of living.    
  
Until then, there are planets upon planets, and rain that falls upward, soaking through their clothes and pulling a grand smile across the Doctor’s lips. Her blonde hair sticks to her forehead and her sodden coat threatens to weigh her down but she holds out her arms and stares at the sky and just breathes. And despite the mysterious founder that is scribed into her DNA and the lies that Gallifrey died to account for, she feels just the same as she always has: a traveler. Bruised and broken, tired and hungry, but ready to seize the day.    
  
When the Master takes a step forward and takes one of her hands, she welcomes his presence with two open hearts and an open mind. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to all of you who read this, and thank you to all who left comments and kudos behind. They mean a lot to me. 
> 
> I may step back into this little universe later and explore some conversations and moments the pair might have while they tour the universe together and come to terms with themselves and their identities, but we'll see. <3


End file.
